You mean "something usefull" like health care for the living instead of looking for rich dead peoples' bodies? I'm sure all those uninsured people waiting 8 hours to be triaged at the county hospital can really relate to flying around in their own airplane.

It is very difficult to electronically detect aluminum pieces on the
ground at a distance of more than a few inches.

Ask any guy walking the beach with a metal locator or a TSA wand person at
the airport.

Airborn systems like the JSTARS that look down at the ground can detect
thickly armored vehicles but have difficulty seeing an undamaged
stationary thin skin civilian vehicle made of typical lite weight
automotive steel body panels.

Aluminum wreckage from a small plane laying on the ground is another
order of magnitude harder to get a signal return from.

The best military terrain mapping radar can get 50 feet resolution but cannot tell the difference between boulders and an engine.

If the engine was 50 feet high and sitting out in the open on flat
land it would just be seen by the mapping radar as a bump.

Shredded small plane wreckage on the side of a mountain can be in small
pieces and laying between boulders, essentially in perfect stealth mode
configuration so look down radar systems designed to actually find
crashed aluminum planes just cannot 'see' it.

I've been doing a lot of wreck chasing over the last couple years, mostly old military sites. I can say from experience that in many cases, sometimes you won't see a wreck unless you are standing right on top of it. As someone said up thread, even satellite images (short of military sats) can be very inadequate foe locating a crash.

While I can understand some people's feelings about the cost of a search, I know that if it was a loved one of mine I would really appreciate being able to recover their body and bury them.

There's always the option of volunteering to do a search - that way then taxpayer wouldn't be footing the bill?

I've done more downed aircraft recoveries than I care to remember...each one is different, with one exception.....they are rarely survivable.

These small planes can disintegrate to small pieces, or come down nearly intact.

The one pictuered below, on the southern flank of Mt. Gib, is a good example of that. In spite of being largely whole, both aboard were killed instantly. The passenger was ejected from centrifical force, and the pilot I had to cut out of the wreckage with my sawzall.

Credit: Cragman

Whether the wreckage is intact or in myriad pieces, they are VERY challenging to find. We searched for many days before this one was spotted on a wide open slope by a hiker moving over Mono Pass, who simply saw a glint of sunlight reflecting off of something high above him.

As has been posited up thread, closure for the families of the lost is important. Our motto here in Mono County is: "We will search anywhere, in any weather, for as long as it takes, for free."

Sat 6/22/13, around Rainbow Pool area of Tuolumne River (west of the park on Hwy 120), saw 4 emergency vehicles high speed and sirens toward the park (Ambulance, 2 police cars, fire dept Paramedic). I was wondering if there was a bad accident in the park, or an accident somewhere behind me.

You mean "something usefull" like health care for the living instead of looking for rich dead peoples' bodies? I'm sure all those uninsured people waiting 8 hours to be triaged at the county hospital can really relate to flying around in their own airplane.

While it's a nice thought, the reality is that not a dime of that money would have gone to pay for healthcare if they hadn't looked for those people. The only thing stopping us from spending more money on healthcare for the poor is that we decide to not spend more money on healthcare for the poor.